Thursday, June 21, 2007

Let's poesy.

The metaphor.

It's an abstraction that's compared, explicitly or implicity, to a concrete image, and the purpose is to get at something bigger than the two of them, to get at something metaphysical. It's one of our most valuable tools as writers.


No man is an island? Indeed, John Donne, indeed.


But metaphors can be quite vicious. As here: watch the meta-free-phor-all that ensues between Stephen Colbert and Sean Penn, which Robert Pinsky graciously moderates.
It's time to get metaphysical.

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